The Dark Issue 70 by J.S. Breukelaar

Author:J.S. Breukelaar [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2021-02-28T00:55:15+00:00

Clara Madrigano is a Brazilian author of speculative fiction. She publishes both in Portuguese and in English, and you can find her fiction in The Dark and in Clarkesworld. Two of her stories were recently selected for the 2020 Locus Recommended Reading List.

A Cold Yesterday in Late July

by David Tallerman

All I knew about Ashby-by-the-Moor was that my father had insisted on being buried there.

Or rather, his will had insisted. It amounted to the same: me trying to squeeze into a parking spot beside a band of village green as cold February rain slanted across the windscreen. Not that there were many people there, but there wasn’t a lot of space either. The village consisted of all of two streets, arranged in a cockeyed cross with the church, appropriately, at its centre.

There were five of us mourners. I didn’t recognise the other four and there wasn’t much in the way of conversation. I wished again that I could have talked Deborah or the girls into coming with me, but Deborah was busy with work and neither Jen nor Heather had the faintest interest in a grandfather they hadn’t met. The ceremony was brief, thank goodness; the rain hadn’t let up. The priest said a few innocuous, impersonal words, and I wondered who’d arranged this. My father, presumably, but to the best of my knowledge, he’d never been religious. Could it be that, seeing the end approaching, he’d found some sad glimmer of faith? He wouldn’t have been the first.

Afterwards, I hurried back to the car. With the heater turned up to full, I took the envelope I’d received the week before from the glove compartment and emptied its contents onto the passenger seat. They consisted of a copy of the will and a small, hardback book bound in a cracked sheaf of glossy paper. The will I returned to the envelope, annoyed by its reminder that at some point I’d have to answer its summons to visit my father’s empty rented flat and collect his remaining belongings. The book I flicked through, as I had twice since I’d received it, each time with puzzlement. I still thought that perhaps a letter might drop out, some final apology or explanation or … something.

But no, unless its hidden messages were written in invisible ink, the slim volume was precisely what it appeared to be and what its title stated: A Book of Local Walks for the Solitary Hiker. The copyright page dated it originally to 1952, though this particular copy was a reissue from a decade later. It listed twenty-seven walks of four to eight miles in length, with names ranging from the studiously dull “Up and Down Faxendale” to the faintly enticing “Around Kirby Top and Past the Devil’s Saddle.” And none of that explained why my father had felt the need to arrange for it to be sent to me after his death.

I put the book down and started the engine. Then I switched the engine off and picked the book up again.

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